Red Hat and Tibco's good news about the enterprise software market appeared to outweigh AMD's revised revenue forecast, while Apple shares hit an all-time high that boosted it past PetroChina to become the second-biggest company in the world in terms of market capitalization, behind Exxon Mobil.

Tibco closed Thursday at $16.37, up by $0.46, and its share price continued climbing Friday morning, hitting its highest mark since 2002.

Reflecting on why share prices of so many tech bellwethers have slumped in the past quarter, Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadiv&#233; stressed product portfolios rather than macroeconomic conditions. Though various IT heavyweights have announced solid results over the past few months, some major players are seen to be mired in the past, Ranadiv&#233; said.

"Some companies are providing 21st-century solutions," Ranadiv&#233; said in a Friday interview in which he took a swipe at companies including Microsoft, which he said offered a "20th-century" approach to software. Microsoft's share price, despite recent record results, has languished for years under CEO Steve Ballmer's leadership.

Just as Apple is a "21st-century consumer electronics company," Tibco's automated business process management (BPM) and analytics offerings, based on service-oriented architecture (SOA), are hitting a "tipping point" where they have become increasingly accepted as an essential part of the way business needs to be done in the Internet era, Ranadiv&#233; said.

Still, Tibco doesn't get as much respect in the market as some other enterprise software vendors. Ranadiv&#233; noted that shares of vendors such as Red Hat sell at much higher multiples of earnings.

Red Hat, which released results Wednesday, hit its highest intraday price in a decade Thursday and is continuing to rise Friday. In early afternoon trading, shares were selling at $41.21, up by $1.14. For the three-month period ending Aug. 31, Red Hat's revenue was $220 million, up 20 percent from the year-earlier period. Profit was $23.7 million, down from the year-earlier period's $28.9 million, but traders seemed to forgive the decline since the 2009 result was boosted in large part by a one-time tax benefit.

Whitehurst pointed to the company's Cloud Foundations portfolio as an "open and cost effective way" to tap into cloud computing.

One of the biggest bright spots of the week came from Apple, whose shares Monday hit what was an all-time high up until that point. They continued to rise throughout the week, closing Thursday with an enterprise market value of $265.8 billion, making Apple the second-biggest company in the world in terms of market capitalization. The latest wave of euphoria in Apple appeared to be spurred by the introduction in China of the Wi-Fi version of the iPad last week.

The market was in a buoyant mood Friday, however, and AMD shares in early afternoon trading were up by $0.41 to $6.81. The flattening out of revenue may have been expected by investors, who have been hit with a flow of reports from market researchers warning that the last half of the year probably would not live up to earlier high hopes.

The news caused markets to slump, but they came roaring back Friday on a U.S. government report showing an increase in orders for manufactured goods last month and better news about the European economy from the Munich-based research institute Ifo, which said its business-sentiment index for Germany rose in September. Through it all, tech companies this week have shown the sort of resilience that helped the sector lead markets out of the recession last year.

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